Archives

The nominees for the 37th annual National Magazine Awards have been announced.

The National Magazine Awards Foundation is proud to be able to provide full-text articles of all nominated work as part of its mandate to promote Canadian magazine creators, broaden the exposure of Canadian magazines to the general public and strengthen the role that magazine content plays in the Canadian cultural landscape.

Like this:

Off the Pageis an exclusive series produced by the NMAF that reaches out to former National Magazine Award winners to find out what their awards have meant to them and what they’re up to now. Off the Pageappears regularly on the Magazine Awards blog. Today we catch up with seven-time National Magazine Award-winning journalist Catherine Dubé, reporter for the French-language current affairs magazine L’actualité.
[Version française]

NMAF: Last year, you won the a Gold National Magazine Award for your article “Demain, des centres à 7 $ par jour pour les vieux?” [Tomorrow, $7-a-day Care Centres for the Elderly?] – your seventh National Magazine Award in the past five years! What prompted you to write this story?

Catherine Dubé (Photo par Marie-Reine Mattera)

Catherine Dubé: The idea was generated in an editorial meeting at L’actualité. We asked ourselves what we can expect over the next 10 to 20 years. We are all going to need care, after all! And the healthcare system is not prepared to take care of the horde of aging Baby Boomers.

The main challenge of the report was to engage our readers about an issue that may not be very sexy. I did what I always do: illustrate the information with lots of concrete examples. I tried to find innovative solutions, such as the one that inspired the title of the piece. Continue reading →

Like this:

Sometime on Saturday the Earth’s equatorial plane will appear to tilt away from the sun and welcome its rays more southward, signaling the autumnal equinox for those of us in the northern hemisphere.

Which means the summer of our Reading Series is about to end. We close with a National Magazine Award category known as One-of-a-Kind, stories particularly unique within the magazine craft.

And, if you have read all thirty award-winning stories we anthologized in our online reading series this season, congratulations! You’ve clearly had a fulfilling summer and you’re ready for the leaves to change!

1. “Adrift on the Nile” by Paul Wilson in The Walrus(Gold, One-of-a-Kind, 2011)A year and a half later, what began in Tahrir Square in Cairo (after it began in Tunisia) seems not yet to have run its full course. Paul Wilson was there when the new liberation movement erupted in Egypt in 2011, and while demonstrations across the Arab world are once again dominating headlines, this National Magazine Award-winning story is worth revisiting, especially given the author’s keens senses of place, scale and history.

“And so began a hair-raising dash through the traffic swirling around Tahrir Square, Phillip always a few paces ahead of me. It was Friday, and another large demonstration had taken place that afternoon; now it was evening, the crowd had thinned, and the atmosphere was more relaxed. A line of skinny kids who looked about twelve years old filed by to the rhythmic beating of an oil drum. Their faces were painted red, white, and black—the colours of the Egyptian flag. ‘Welcome!’ ” [Read more]

2. “The Lizard, the Catacombs & the Clock” by Sean Michaels in Brick (Gold, One-of-a-Kind, 2010)
The intoxicating story of the underground labyrinths of Paris and the cataphiles who spelunk within them, Sean Michaels explores one of the more mysterious sides of the world’s most-visited city.

Parisians call it a gruyère. For hundreds of years, the catacombs under the city have been a conduit, sanctuary, and birthplace for its secrets. The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables’ Jean Valjean both haunted these tunnels, striking students descended in 1968, as did patriots during the Second World War. The Nazis visited too, building a bunker in the maze below the 6th arrondissement. [Read more]

3. “Driving Mary Seigel” by Chris Koentges in Swerve (Silver, One-of-a-Kind, 2008)Chris Koentges is a three-time winner in this category and any of his pieces is worth a good long look, but this story in particular is topical since it recounts the author’s trip across the United States of America in the summer and fall of 2008, trying to figure out what made its ordinary citizens so hopeful about a presidential candidate named Barack Obama.

“From an SUV, someone yelled ‘Obama guy.’ I pretended to ignore it, waiting for the lights to change. ‘Hey, Obama guy!’ There was this goading Phillip Seymour Hoffman inﬂection, and this similar kind of concentration in his face. He had ﬂown in from L.A. because Southern Florida—the battleground—was what he wanted to remember 50 years from now. He spoke about watching the 2000 election on TV, about the fact that he and I simply being here was enough to break the karmic loop.” [Read more]

Like this:

What makes a person tick? We sometimes ask a question like that anticipating an equally laconic answer. Ah, but the magazine is among many things a forum for nuance and context. The best personal portraits are those that explore the underlying connections between a character’s traits and his or her environment, both past and present, and therein construct a deeper connection between the character and the reader.

The penultimate installment of our 2012 Summer Reading Series exposes the art of the profile, with three Canadians–a politician, an athlete and a scientist–whose lives jump off the page.

As you probably know by now, these stories and those of all finalists and winners from the past few years can be found in the National Magazine Awards archive (magazine-awards.com/archive).

1. “Madam Premier” by Lisa Gregoire in The Walrus (2011 Gold winner in Profiles)One quickly derives from her matter-of-fact depiction of Nunavut premier Eva Aariak that 6-time NMA nominee Lisa Gregoire is describing someone composed of the arctic itself: vast, powerful, and capable of great transformation. The challenges facing the present and future of Canada’s youngest political territory may be greater than one woman can bear, but as Ms. Gregoire patiently investigates, Madam Premier is a person of uncommon determination and clarity.

“Eva Aariak is a patient January Capricorn, born when people in my world were building rockets and people in her world were navigating frozen moonscapes with homemade qamutiik (sleds), when people from both our worlds were founding Frobisher Bay, now Iqaluit, so my people could encourage her people to stop wandering and start praying. Nunavut has been imagined, designed, negotiated, legislated, and commemorated, all within her lifetime.” [Read more]

2. “The Unstoppable Lena Rowat” by Geoff Powter in Explore (2009 Gold winner in Profiles)The title sums up this piece superbly. Lena Rowat was determined to ski from Vancouver to the Yukon’s formidable Mount Logan and then beyond to Alaska, the very idea of which is so bizarre and so compelling to most of us couch-based mortals as to beg the inquiry: Surely, someone or something would stop her; otherwise, there would have to be some degree of insanity involved, or else some untold truth of human motivation that demands a complete explanation.

“These are the days of a typical Lena Rowat ski traverse: Up with the dawn, breakfast is whatever liquid you’ve kept in the water bottle in your sleeping bag through the night. You break through the brain fog of the morning and find your pace, often on your own, in silence, up and down and across kilometre after kilometre of white ridges and glacial rolls. You stop and dig a pit for lunch, the big meal of the day, a carefully planned allotment of mega calories, with gobs of olive oil in every dish to get you through the long afternoon. You ski until your legs or the terrain tell you to stop.” [Read more]

3. “The Trials of Saint Suzuki” by Ken MacQueen in Maclean’s (2007 Gold winner in Profiles)
The gradual transformation of activist David Suzuki from drum-beating environmental voice in the wilderness to political and corporate environmental consultant has not gone unnoticed by those who have long held his tireless work as gospel. And yet there is no paradox in the character of one of Canada’s most famous citizens; rather, an evolution that is very much of the environmental movement itself.

“Climate change, doing what it does, has indeed changed the climate of debate. New tactics are called for from environmentalists, too, and that includes a corporate rapprochement, of a sort. Suzuki—whose organization, in the past, has taken pride in its lack of corporate donors—admits he’ll need an attitude adjustment.” [Read more]

Like this:

Two days hence and the stars and starlets of Hollywood will park their jets in Hogtown for the Toronto International Film Festival, and you’ll pardon this blogger if he’s camped at the corner of Bellair and Cumberland streets ready to ambush Shia LaBeouf or Gwyneth Paltrow and get them to plug the new National Magazine Awards eBook (free download on iTunes) to their Twitter followers.

Apropos of which, this week’s installment of our Summer Reading Series is cinematically themed: 3 award-winning stories from the category Arts & Entertainment with a nod to the film industry descending on our fair city.

1. “Man Standing” by Timothy Taylor, Canadian Art (2011 Silver winner in Arts & Entertainment)Canadian Inuit filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk is no stranger to TIFF; his masterpiece Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner won the honour of Best Canadian Feature Film back in 2001. Timothy Taylor travels (with NMA-winning photographer Donald Weber) to the Arctic hamlet of Igoolik to interview Kunuk about his latest film, Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. It’s a rare opportunity to acquaint oneself with the ecology of this transcendent artist, who by rights and geography is more than a bit removed the rest of the country yet has helped his audiences (and his neighbours) redefine their notions of history.

“Walking around Igloolik, meanwhile, I sense the reach that Kunuk’s work has had in the community. He downplays it, saying, ‘My hunting buddies are still my hunting buddies.’ But if you’ve watched his films closely, you recognize a surprising number of faces in town. Even people I don’t recognize turn out to have had off-camera roles, like the woman I speak with at the high school who is proud that she learned to sew traditional caribou-skin parkas while working in the wardrobe department for Atanarjuat.” [Read more]

2. “My Dad, the Movie and Me” by Noah Richler, The Walrus (2010 Gold winner in Arts & Entertainment)The son of the late Canadian literary icon Mordechai Richler is more than just behind the scenes on the Montreal sets of Barney’s Version, the Richard Lewis adaptation (starring Paul Giamatti, Minnie Driver and Dustin Hoffman) of Richler’s famous novel. Noah Richler employs his unique position intersecting the writer and the film to reflect on his father’s notions of family, marriage and sense of belonging; the re-animation of his father’s personality through the title character is both stimulating and calming.

“Barney’s Version, like his earlier novels St. Urbain’s Horseman and Joshua Then and Now, draws on my parents’ exemplary love and what, even to his death, struck my father as the wild unlikelihood of having been able to love and raise a family with this striking woman. From Jake Hersh’s beloved wife in St. Urbain’s Horseman (‘Nancy. Nancy, my darling’) to the third Mrs. Panofsky of Barney’s Version (‘Miriam, Miriam, my heart’s desire’), there exists in his work a portrait of the shiksa wife as love object that his author hero is stunned to have acquired but also believes, in some buried and persecuted Jewish part of himself, he is besmirching.” [Read more]

Like this:

The Short Feature is the catchy folk song of the magazine world–three chords, succinct enlightenment, and a tune you’re glad to have stuck in your head.

Sure, a lot of what makes magazines great is the freedom they give writers to compose elaborate, multi-faceted rock operas of meaningful prose. (To wit: David Remnick’s twelve-million-word profile of Bruce Springsteen in a recent New Yorker.)

But the short feature starts and finishes the story without leaving you feeling like you just stayed up all night listening to Darkness on the Edge of Town.

This year we had a tie for the Gold in BSF–a dead-even top score after six independent judges evaluated the submissions–so we’re glad to feature them both in our Summer Reading Series, along with the first-ever winner in this category.

As always, these complete articles and those of all finalists and winners from recent years can be found in the National Magazine Awards archive (magazine-awards.com/archive).

1. “JJ Lee on the first time he told a girl she was beautiful,” ELLE Canada (2011 Gold winner, tie, in Best Short Feature)It’s an episode we can all relate to: first love. For memoirist JJ Lee–writing in ELLE‘s popular “First” series–it was the very moment that the comic-book femininity he’d come to know in early adolescence faded into the blinding eclipse of a real-life muse. And in that universally awkward moment of expression, he felt himself becoming an artist.

“The words had struck her. She would never look at herself in a mirror the same way again. They had struck me too. And I felt doomed because I knew we had our whole future to separate us from the simple closeness of the moment. That was the day I began a lifelong career as a maudlin nostalgic.” [Read more]

2. “When Your Mother is a Stranger” by Heather O’Neill, Chatelaine (2011 Gold winner, tie, in Best Short Feature)In this vivid reconstruction of a singularly tender moment–meeting her mother after an absence of ten years–two-time National Magazine Award winner Heather O’Neill (she also won Gold in this same category in 2010) rewinds her childhood to each of the most potent memories that can help her re-imagine this stranger as her mother, a person of ancient familiarity in a suddenly foreign context.

“I went to the address she gave me. She was living in a building known as the Crazy People Building. It has the cheapest rent in the neighbourhood and is filled with people who can never quite pull it together. Bare-chested men hang out of the windows in the summer. A man who lives there carries around a white kitten that wears a tie and is introduced as Mr. Timothy. There is an old man who dances on his toes as he walks, blowing kisses at anyone he makes eye contact with.” [Read more]

3. “The Alchemy of Pork Fat” by Gerald Hannon, Toronto Life (2007 Gold winner in Best Short Feature)When the NMAF launched the Best Short Feature category in 2007, Toronto Life‘s foodie memoirs turned out to be an ideal fit (the judges that year awarded four of the ten finalists’ spots to these tasty TL shorts, each consisting of a personal essay and a recipe), and none better than the Gold-winning piece by 13-time National Magazine Award winner Gerald Hannon.

Hannon–warts and all–reminisces on the great motherly myths of food, especially those involving lard, and wonders how he could have evolved such a passion for gastronomy without them.

“Food, perhaps because it was scarce and unvarying, always seemed to tremble with the potential for good or ill. Even in her old age, [my mother] could not add cucumber to a salad without first neutralizing its ‘poison’ in a way she had learned from her mother: you cut about an inch off the end, rubbed that piece vigorously against the other cut edge until a milky liquid—the poison—appeared, then you threw out the small, now noxious piece to render the rest of the cucumber safe to eat.” [Read more]

Like this:

“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.”
– Hannah Arendt

As our Summer Reading Series continues with a selection of poetry, we prefer not to linger too long by way of introduction. As A. E. Housman wrote, “Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out… Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.” We tend to agree. Better to let the poets speak for poetry and let the poems speak for themselves.

The following winners in the category of Poetry, and many others, can be found in the National Magazine Awards archive (magazine-awards.com/archive)

1.“Pa” and “Bq”by Matthew Holmes, Arc (2011 Gold winner in Poetry)Though we do not always need perfect understanding before (or even after) the reading of a poem, an author’s insight into the creative process is often as delightful as the poem itself. Holmes offers a welcome hint or two in a thought-provoking introduction, followed by the award-winning pair of poems from his project, “The failing of purity”:

how water bends before letting your finger in, how
rain is coming (the flower says), how
rain is coming, how
luck falls, like salt thrown by a god, it falls not. [Read more]

2.“St. Anthony’s Fire” and “The Perfect Fatherhood”by Shane Neilson, The Fiddlehead, (2011 Silver winner in Poetry)In these fluid configurations, Neilson muses about two profoundly manifest contemplations of the heart: the ironies inherent in god, and the mysteries of parenthood in its wondrous responsibility for another life.

Robbed of touch with peripheral neuropathies and the visible sores, the manna from heaven contaminated with Claviceps purpurea, whole civilizations monster-movied, disease being the measure of purity in a lost, misbegotten heaven… [Read more]

3. “Paradise, Later Years” by Marion Quednau, Malahat Review(2009 Gold winner in Poetry)In this playful and insightful work, Quednau composes a rhythmic meditation on the nature of our relationship with nature and, ultimately, with ourselves:

I’ve taught them everything I know: that greed is largely forgivable grandstanding, and making a small ruckus is good, might still change the world, and thirst when it hits you, despite an abundance of water and wine for some, and nothing dripping down the spout for all the rest, is merely stoppered-up desire, and what makes humans so different from that lobster not going at all gently is that we can have what we want – scary thought. [Read more]

Share it!

Like this:

Posts navigation

The National Magazine Awards Foundation is a bilingual, not-for-profit institution whose mission is to recognize and promote excellence in the content and creation of Canadian print and digital publications through an annual program of awards and national publicity efforts.